Data News

Information, data and behind-the-scenes details from the WNYC Data News Team.

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NYC: Here's where lead has been found in school water fountains recently (tested in November 2016 or later). We’re looking for more data, especially from Queens schools - school buildings marked as grey had at least one elevated sample but we don’t have a copy of the results letter (looks like this) to see how many water fountains, if any, had lead. If you have a copy of a letter to share, send it to us at [email protected].

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NYC metro area: Congress is on its first weeklong recess since President Trump’s inauguration (February 18 - February 26). This is traditionally a time for representatives to host town hall meetings with constituents, but we found that less than half of the tri-state region's Congress members are hosting meetings. Use our Town Hall Tracker to see if your representatives are hosting a public meeting, and if you attend a meeting, share your experience with us using the hashtag #TownHallTracker.

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Notes on Building a Judicial Election Tool

In 2016, WNYC set out to help New Yorkers "Judge Your Judges."

The plan was to help increase access to nonpartisan voter information about judges by prototyping data aggregation tool that makes information about judicial candidates easy to find and navigate.

Or, in other words, give people a sense of all those unfamiliar names on the judicial ballot -- who could affect policing, divorces and everyday life for everyday people.

The Knight Foundation supported this effort with a prototyping grant.

Our Premise

Judicial elections are the one of the least understood, least voted-in contests on the ballot, despite the fact that judges have a direct impact on individuals and communities. Few voters know the candidates, their purviews, a court’s history or the problems it faces.

We hoped that increasing voters' local knowledge and participation in these life-impacting elections might get them more civically involved by showing concrete effects of their votes - how their vote impacts them.

In the end, I often brought us back to this scenario: "Imagine a voter standing in line at the poll and with no idea about the judicial elections. What can we give her to help make an informed choice?"

Areas of Inquiry

So many questions. We needed to dig, and fortunately we had the help of a bunch of investigators. They were Alex Gerald, Charles Innis, Gonzalo del Peon and Caitrin Sneed -- students at the New School University's Journalism + Design program, who were in a class taught by journalist Sarah Ryley specifically for this project. That class was made possible with a grant from the Revson Foundation.

The class set out to answer several questions:

What would help people make their judicial election choices?

What is each court supposed to do? What are they actually doing?

What impact does a judge have on the outcome of a case? Can we quantify it?

How does the judicial selection process work?

What are its faults?

Who were the delegates in the most recent races?

How much influence do voters have on the outcome?

Have there been any efforts to reform the process? What came of them?

Which seats are up?

Which races would make the most sense to focus on?

The students conducted surveys at the courthouse, shadowed reporters who cover the courts, interviewed attorneys, interviewed judges, called judicial delegates, talked to lawyers groups and got as much information online and on paper as they could.

Among their findings were that people at the courthouse would like information on candidates' resumes and backgrounds before they go to the polls.

The class also found out that the New York State judicial election process is so complicated that even seasoned lawyers didn't fully understand it.

Results

The work of these students provided the base for reporting of a series of stories by WNYC reporter Kat Aaron leading up to the primary and general elections in New York City.

The WNYC Data News team, joined for the summer and fall of 2016 by student Alex Gerald, to build an address-based voter guide. The guide, for what we believe was the first time, included names and information about delegates -- the folks who ultimately decide who the New York judicial candidates will be.

WNYC has openly published the code and base data for the voter guide so that others may use it in future guides. In the near future -- and certainly before the next election season -- we hope to make it more plug-and-play and easier to repurpose.

Room for Improvement

The hope of our original grant was to create and test methods for getting this information out to people beyond our listening audience, including non-listeners who face arrest, eviction, foreclosure, collections, custody fights and divorce proceedings. Our prototype allowed to do some user testing on paper and cardboard models, and we did extensive user testing on our site. But we weren't able to explore as far as might be possible with a project devoted to only that -- something that may be easier now that we have prototyped building resources in general.

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New Yorkers, Trump and Clinton won't be the only ones on your ballot on Tuesday. Use our New York ballot guide to learn about candidates running in your district for everything from State Senator to Civil Court Judge. 

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Polls in New York are open until 9 p.m. tonight for the state and local primary. Here’s our guide with information on the candidates running. After polls close, we’ll have live results here.

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In 2000, there were 1,394 Section 8 voucher households in Williamsburg’s nine census tracts where 40% or more of the population over 5 years old spoke Yiddish at home. By 2014, there were 12 such tracts housing 3,296 voucher households.

In Part 2 of our series on Section 8 in New York City, WNYC reporter Cindy Rodriguez and freelance investigative reporter Lisa Riordan Seville look at how Section 8 has helped the Hasidic community grow in Williamsburg.

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More than 80% of Section 8 tenants in NYC now live in high-poverty areas, up from 2009. WNYC reporter Cindy Rodriguez and freelance investigative reporter Lisa Riordan Seville look at how the pressures of a heating housing market may be a reason why.

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Last year, Housing Choice Vouchers (Section 8) provided rent assistance to 123,000 New York City households. Section 8 in New York City has grown by more 50% since 2000, but budget cuts and rising rents raise questions about the stability of the program. Listen to Part 1 of our series with our interactive map and read the story in the New York Daily News.

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New York bird species endangered by climate change

Yesterday we published a story on a little brown bird struggling to hang on, the Saltmarsh Sparrow, at risk of extinction because of rising sea levels. We contacted the National Audubon Society and received data on all the New York bird species at risk of losing their ranges during the Summer nesting season. We were surprised to see so many ducks, including the Mallard, and birds like the Common Raven that we didn’t know were at risk. We made a graphical chart showing which birds have lost the most range, the birds at the top being those with the most loss. 

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Nailbiter Bot returns for March Madness

Nailbiter Bot tweets whenever a NCAA men’s or women’s basketball tournament game is close near the end. Never miss a game that is going down to the wire! 

A game counts as close if:

* The score is within 8 points with between 1:30 and 3:00 left on the clock

* The score is within 6 points with between :30 and 1:30 left on the clock

* The score is within 4 points in the last 30 seconds

You can follow along on Twitter, but if you use the Twitter app for iOS or Android, you can also get mobile notifications whenever Nailbiter Bot tweets:

If you’d like to learn how we created Nailbiter Bot in 2014, check out our Source blog post here.

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The NYPD is updating a map of serious crimes in New York City, but what does the map not tell us? Sarah Gonzalez and Noah Veltman discuss. 

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From 1936 to 1966, a Harlem postal worker named Victor Green published the Green Book, a travel guide that listed businesses where black travelers were welcome. The New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has digitized almost every edition of the Green Book and NYPL Labs has visualized these guides.

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The NYC Department of Education announced yesterday that the city’s high school graduation rate topped 70% - that’s the 4-Year August graduation rate. We look at the 4-Year June graduation rate. Look up your school’s 4-Year June graduation rate here.

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There are 14,066 known contaminated sites in New Jersey. Most are in the process of being remediated by private contractors, but 1,464 (10.4%) of the sites don’t have any cleanup plan in place. These sites are disproportionately located in low-income and communities of color. Listen to Sarah Gonzalez’s story, “Dirty Little Secrets: New Jersey’s Poorest Live Surrounded by Contamination.” Look up, and let us know about contaminated sites in New Jersey using our map.

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A little more than three years after Sandy hit, progress in construction through the city's "Build it Back" program varies by neighborhood. Construction has begun on 10.9% of projects with a City-hired contractor in Broad Channel, 70% of projects in Midland Beach, Staten Island. Citywide, about a third of owners who have applied for construction help have seen work begin. 

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New York City’s new formula for calculating school capacity includes 50,000 more students in overcrowded schools in 2014-15 vs. 2013-14. See how overcrowding counts have changed over the two years here. 

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WNYC teamed up with The Marshall Project to put this week’s prisoner release in perspective, hear from former prisoners, and explore this apparent turning point in American thinking about criminal justice and incarceration.